Machiavellian Missouri Synod Minions in a Modern Morality Tale: The Changing Face of Conservatism in America

By
definition, conservatives hate change.
Religious conservatives, one might say, double-down on the hatred by
wrapping the fetish of a static point amidst the contingency of history in
transcendent garments of one kind or another. The great virtue of James C.
Burkee’s Power, Politics, and the Missouri Synod is to document how
much, despite their rhetoric about preserving timeless truth, the conservatives
at the core of the 1960s-70s schism in The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod changed
their denomination. It remains to be
seen how much they might have changed American culture and Christianity, as
Burkee’s subtitle claims. My own
hypothesis is that this tempest-in-a-teapot will go down as a relatively minor
and deservedly forgotten episode in the broader history of religious violence
in American culture in the past half-century.
No blood was let, but there was plenty of violence dressed up in piety
to go around. So what else is new in
America?

Burkee’s
book, originally a Northwestern University dissertation, traces the history of
the LCMS from 1938 to 1981. Throughout, Burkee also has an eye on
contemporary developments. As he sees
it, things have gotten worse. “In 1972
membership in the Missouri Synod peaked at nearly 2.9 million members. Since then the church has lost over five
hundred thousand members.”(183) Burkee
attributes this loss to the contentious spirit of the Synod during the
seventies. “A once thriving church . . .
had become an also-ran, struggling for existence and relevance even as it
continued the fight to define itself.”(183)
As I have pointed out elsewhere, other causes for statistical decline
within the Missouri Synod and other mainline Protestant denominations are more
likely than theological bickering to explain things--notably immigration
patterns and birth-rates—but those would not fit the morality-tale plot-line.

So,
Burkee’s plot features “decline.” He
thus crafts, one might suppose, a tragedy—as Burkee himself suggests in a
publisher’s interview. More accurately, however, Burkee’s approach
is through satire, in the classic sense of using irony and ridicule to expose
and criticize the stupidity, cravenness, and folly of actors, especially in the
political arena. “Sunlight is the best
disinfectant,” Burkee quotes Justice Louis D. Brandeis as the epigraph to the
entire work (xiii). This is a satire
exposing the impurity of an ostensible purity program.

Burkee’s cast is a decidedly pale
and shadowy bunch. He focuses, with good
reason, on the conservatives who organized (and re-organized repeatedly as
their coalitions turned on each other) to take over the LCMS in the 1970s. The most famous among them is Jacob A. O. Preus II, the son
of a Minnesota Governor who was elected President of the LCMS in 1969 and served
in that office until 1981. His younger
brother, Robert—another Lutheran pastor and President of the Seminary at
Springfield, IL (later Fort Wayne, IN) also appears prominently. Both come across as less-than-forthright,
double-dealing, if not downright despicable.
As if in ironic fulfillment of the biblical narrative about certain
brothers, they couldn’t even get along, apparently, with each other. But the chief character in this morality tale
is Herman Otten, long-time editor of Christian News. Otten, according to Burkee, was the
“progenitor” of the conservative movement in Missouri, “the single most
influential conservative in the synod before 1969,” and the Synod’s “great
pitiable” and “most infamous figure.”(7-9)
I am persuaded by the evidence Burkee marshals—ranging across
interviews, convention proceedings, and previously inaccessible archival
holdings--that his judgment on this matter is accurate. Herman Otten was the puppet-master pulling
the strings of conservatives across the Missouri Synod. Few acknowledged his influence. Many vilified him in public. But Burkee documents unmistakably how
conservatives depended on Otten behind the scenes, and even more how he shaped
the terms of the debate by changing the central theological issues at
stake.

What Otten did was in effect to
force change in the confessional theology of the Missouri Synod to make it
conform with neo-conservative (McCarthy-and-John Birch inspired, solidly
Republican, Reagan-right-wing culture-war) politics: “The LCMS,” Burkee honestly recognizes,
courtesy of Herman Otten “has . . . assumed a place in America’s emergent
Religious Right.”(11) It cannot be
stressed how much of an innovation this was. For most of its brief life-span, as I traced
in Hopes
and Dreams of All--my history of the LCMS youth auxiliary, Lutherans in
the Missouri Synod held a range of political persuasions. They were even willing to engage one another
in civil debates about such penultimate matters (I track in particular the
debates over “die frauen Frage”—decided in favor of women’s suffrage
among the Leaguers twenty-years before general suffrage in the U.S., and the debates
about the rise of the Third Reich in Germany—about which LCMS Lutherans were
badly divided; Otten continues to contest the veracity of Holocaust
accounting). What Otten accomplished was
to build a platform for conservatives by uniting politics and theology against
“liberals” in a decidedly non-Lutheran (but typically American) fashion. He thus overthrew centuries of what has been
called “the two-kingdoms doctrine,” whereby Lutherans recognized God’s work of
law in political life, on the one hand (justice and order depend on the best
efforts of people to preserve peace—but all fail and fall under sin and death)
and God’s work of grace in the life of the church, on the other (which saves,
through faith in Christ, as mediated in Word and Sacrament). Otten’s blend of theology and politics as an
early “culture warrior” destroyed this careful doctrinal balancing act between
law and gospel by conflating the two. As
if in karmic consequence of this doctrinal innovation, as Burkee’s satire makes
abundantly clear, the larger movement that grew up in the orbit of Otten’s
over-heated rhetoric destroyed lives, careers, and (perhaps) a denomination in
the process. By trying to “purify” an
institution (and especially its Seminary—they are, after all, notorious places
of rampant impurity), conservatives harmed, if not destroyed, it. Purity, one might put it, is God’s
prerogative. Humans are too dangerous to
be trusted with it—as the crucifixion of Jesus supposedly makes manifestly
evident.

The central shibboleth in Otten’s
assault—which began by targeting the Saint Louis Seminary faculty that had
refused to approve him for ordination in 1958--was biblical “inerrancy.”
Inerrancy arose as a doctrine in the late 19th and early 20th
century as a reaction to historical criticism.
It claimed to be the “common sense” and “literal” interpretation of
Scripture, but in fact was a severe truncation of the pluralistic medieval
methods of hermeneutics (literal, allegorical, typological, etc.). Inerrancy was, furthermore, clearly designed
to “defend” Scripture using (ironically) a scientific-historical criterion of
truth (of which medieval and early modern interpreters were, naturally,
unaware). This historical-scientific
level of meaning became the default “literal,” meaning, which (of course) it
isn’t (most of Scripture is, obviously, pre-scientific poetic or theological
truth), but so it seemed to be—which then made it a very strong and convenient
fetish on which to hang the “predictable” (Jacob Preus’ word) “liberals.” A 20th century method of biblical
interpretation (usually exercised in English, no less) became a political
weapon, which in Otten’s discourse was wielded not only against
historically-critical seminary professors, but also against advocates of civil
rights, ecumenists, big government, the social gospel, feminists, and
communists—“‘liberals’ all.”(59)

Burkee tracks nicely how various
leaders in the conservative movement within Missouri jumped on and off the Christian
News bandwagon at various times, and on various issues. Burkee is not a theologically-sophisticated
historian, so he is somewhat tone-deaf to just how strange and new this hybrid
theological-political blending was among Lutherans in America (who ought to
have learned a lesson about such blending in Germany). About the election of Jacob Preus to the
presidency of the LCMS in 1969, for instance, he writes:

Conservatives hoped for the
theologian but got the politician. In
1969, Preus took charge of a movement that seemed unified. Humbly accepting nomination by his backers
and election by delegates, he quickly distanced himself from the first by
reaching out to the second. That Preus
was a master of duplicity is the one point on which nearly all those I interviewed
(who were willing to talk) agreed. He
seized control of the church and built a decade-long career by constructing and
fueling a fraudulent leadership dynamic in the church, consistently showing one
face to the public and another to his cronies.
From the day of his election in 1969, Jack Preus openly and repeatedly
condemned the men who elected and kept him in power [notably, Herman Otten],
only to backtrack with them in private. . . .
He gave conservatives what they wanted—victory against the
liberals. When it was achieved, the tenuous
coalition collapsed and turned on him while conservatives turned on each
other.(10)

What Burkee struggles to recognize is how theologies are
inevitably politically implicated, if not thereby defined. They are words. They bear meaning, which is why people find
in them cultural power. The interesting
historical question is how theological words connect the power of religious
symbols to other kinds of power—institutional, political, and cultural. What Burkee’s work in the primary sources
allows us to recognize is that the conservative movement in Missouri actually
overthrew the long history of Lutheran recognition that politics is
penultimate, under the accusation of law and the “left hand” of God. All fall short. All need mercy. All bear the responsibility to be as
ethically responsible as possible, following the highest (not the lowest—as
evident in this episode) standards of integrity, rationality, and compassion.

So,
Lutheran clarity about how the law always accuses ought to promote a degree of
charity towards each other, and even (as one ethical teacher—and, no, that’s
not all he was--once put it) the mandate and capacity to love one’s
enemies. There’s scarce little evidence
of that in this history, featuring Missouri Synod “minions” (that’s Burkee’s
word, not mine) evidencing the fascinating Machiavellian machinations of a
minor episode in American religious history.
A similar history is well over-due for the liberal Lutheran side, which
would also lend itself to satire—although elements of both tragedy and comedy
would also fit the evidence. But in any
event the episode Burkee satirizes here may well have changed “American
Christianity,” but I suspect it heightens instead a deep continuity. Throughout American history, Christians have
repeatedly tended (been tempted?) to engage religion on behalf of
violence—understood not only as physical force, but also as systematic
exclusion, as policies that scapegoat and vilify (through omission or
commission), and as language that lies.
This temptation became acute in the post-WWII U.S. empire-building era
of nuclear proliferation, assassinations, and military and civil conflict. In that milieu, believers across both liberal
and conservative camps took sides in becoming self-professed (if not self-righteous)
“cultural warriors” for Jesus, blurring the paradoxical tradition of authentic
Christian public witness in devotion to American civil religions of one stripe
or another (see on that theme my most recent book, Empire
of Sacrifice). Whether, as
Burkee clearly hopes, the disinfectant of historical sunlight and satire can
also create any room for reconciliation—another key direction in the history of
American religion over the past half-century—decidedly remains to be seen. That would be a story, among Lutherans in
America—and many other religious groups, worth remembering.

Comments

Anonymous said…

Enjoyed the review. As a preacher's kid whose most vivid memories from that time include my parents' deep concerns over what would eventually result from the so-called "Battle for the Bible," I'm really not so surprised to see the Missouri Synod where it is now. Very incisive comment about the conservative groups re-organizing and then re-organizing again as they turned on each other.

P.S. Also enjoyed Hopes and Dreams of All when I read it a few years ago.